Law

Many were anticipating that #ComeyDay would be the most monumental congressional hearing in decades, but the truth is that it turned out to be quite a dud. During two and a half hours of testimony in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, former FBI Director James Comey didn’t tell us anything that we don’t already know. Of course liberal news outlets such as CNN are breathlessly proclaiming that we are now “in Nixon territory”, but that isn’t accurate at all. There is absolutely no evidence that President Trump committed any crime, and there is absolutely nothing that warrants impeachment.

And I am far from alone in that assessment. For example, an analysis published by CNBC says that nothing in Comey’s testimony was “powerful enough to end the Trump presidency literally or figuratively”…

“Former FBI Director James Comey’s Senate testimony Thursday will indeed have a big political impact in Washington. It will foster more partisan bitterness and more bad feelings about our political process and news media. But none of his testimony rises to the level of anything legally powerful enough to end the Trump presidency literally or figuratively.

The bottom line is that Comey spent a few hours Thursday telling the Senate committee that he felt uncomfortable and even stunned by President Trump’s behavior. And he peppered that narrative with numerous damaging statements about the president’s behavior and character, including basically calling him a liar”

When Comey accused Trump of being a liar, that certainly made a lot of headlines, but unless you are under oath it is not a crime to lie.

Perhaps we should make it a crime for our politicians to lie, because if we did we would clean out the toilet that Washington D.C. has become rather quickly. But as it stands, even if Trump is a low-down dirty liar as Comey is claiming, that would simply put Trump on the same level as most of the current members of Congress.

The much more important question is whether or not Trump committed obstruction of justice. Fortunately for Trump, there is a very clear answer to that question.

First of all, we must remember that Trump was Comey’s boss. As chief executive, Trump has constitutional power to direct the activities of his subordinates, and he is free to fire them whenever he chooses. So, as Alan Dershowitz just pointed out on CNN, Trump cannot be impeached for simply exercising his constitutional authority…

Renowned Harvard professor and legal mind Alan Dershowitz sparked quite a reaction during a CNN segment on Wednesday night after he proclaimed that former FBI director James Comey’s prepared testimony indicates that President Donald Trump didn’t commit any crimes.

Dershowitz argued that Trump “could have told Comey, ‘You are commanded, directed to drop the investigation against [Gen. Michael] Flynn,’” but noted that he didn’t do so, according to Comey’s prepared testimony that was published on Wednesday.

The famed attorney also said Trump could have pardoned Flynn as well, but also chose not to do so. In the end, he concluded that there appears to be no criminal activity on the part of the president, particularly when it comes to obstruction of justice claims.

Traditionally, the FBI has operated in a highly independent manner, but there is nothing in the law that gives the FBI independent status.

If Congress wants to pass a law to remove the FBI from being under the president’s authority they can certainly do that, but as it stands what Trump did was fully within the law.

But even if Trump didn’t have the authority, there would still be no obstruction of justice. The two most important federal statutes that cover obstruction of justice are 18 U.S.C. § 1503 and 18 U.S.C. § 1505. In both cases, it would be exceedingly difficult for prosecutors to prove that Trump acted “corruptly” in this case. Not only that, there was no “proceeding” that Trump was trying to influence. For a more extended analysis, please see the article that I posted yesterday entitled “Even If Everything James Comey Is Claiming Is True, There Is Still No Evidence That Trump Is Guilty Of Any Crime”.

If Comey is being straight with us, and at this point his credibility is pretty much shot, but if he is being straight with us there is still nothing that is going to end Trump’s presidency.

What Trump did may have been “inappropriate”, but you don’t impeach a president for being “inappropriate”.

President Donald Trump’s private attorney, Marc Kasowitz, on Wednesday said his client felt “completely and totally vindicated” by James Comey’s prepared opening statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Comey’s remarks, released Wednesday in advance of Thursday’s Senate hearing, confirmed previous statements by Trump that Comey had told him three times that he was not personally being investigated amid the FBI’s wide-ranging inquiry into Russian meddling in the election and the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia.

Personally, I hope that this whole “scandal” will go away now. There never was anything to it in the first place, and the American people want a government that is going to focus on solving problems instead of focusing on investigations that were doomed to go absolutely nowhere from the start.

But even if this Comey angle doesn’t work out, the Democrats will just keep on trying. In fact, the Huffington Post is already starting to promote the theory that Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement is an impeachable offense.

In the end, the Democrats are never going to give up until they find something that they can use against Trump. What I am hearing is that they are going to make an all-out push to take back the House and the Senate in 2018, and if they can do that they plan to use their congressional majorities to get rid of Trump one way or another.

This is just another reason why the 2018 mid-term elections are going to be the most important mid-term elections in modern American history, because if the Democrats have their way Trump will never even make it to 2020.

On Tuesday, President Trump announced that he would nominate Neil Gorsuch to fill the open seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Gorsuch currently serves on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, and he was confirmed unanimously by the Senate when he was appointed to that position by President George W. Bush in 2006. Gorsuch appears to have some strong similarities to Antonin Scalia, and many conservatives are hoping that when Gorsuch fills Scalia’s seat that it will represent a shift in the balance of power on the Supreme Court. Because for almost a year, the court has been operating with only eight justices. Four of them were nominated by Republican presidents and four of them were nominated by Democrats, and so many Republicans are anticipating that there will now be a Supreme Court majority for conservatives.

Unfortunately, things are not that simple, because a couple of the “conservative” justices are not actually very conservative at all.

For example, it is important to remember that Scalia was still on the court when the Supreme Court decision that forced all 50 states to legalize gay marriage was decided. Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the four liberal justices in a majority opinion that Scalia harshly criticized. So with Gorsuch on the court, that case would still have been decided the exact same way.

Sadly, even though Kennedy was nominated by Ronald Reagan, he has turned out to be quite liberal. In the past, not nearly enough scrutiny was given to justices that were nominated by Republican presidents, and a few of them have turned out to be total disasters.

And let us also remember that Scalia was still on the court when the big Obamacare case was decided. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the four liberal justices in a decision that was perhaps one of the most bizarre in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

For some reason, Justice Roberts was determined to preserve Obamacare, and if you read what he wrote it is some of the most twisted legal reasoning that I have ever come across.

As someone that was once part of the legal world, let me let you in on a little secret. Most judges simply do whatever they feel like doing, and then they will try to find a way to justify their decisions. So if you ever find yourself in court, you should pray that you will get a judge that is sympathetic to your cause.

Fortunately, Gorsuch appears to be one of the rare breed of judges that actually cares what the U.S. Constitution and our laws have to say. In that respect, he is very much like Scalia…

Gorsuch is seen by analysts as a jurist similar to Scalia, who died on Feb. 13, 2016. Scalia, praised by Gorsuch as “a lion of the law,” was known not only for his hard-line conservatism but for interpreting the U.S. Constitution based on what he considered its original meaning, and laws as written by legislators. Like Scalia, Gorsuch is known for sharp writing skills.

“It is the role of judges to apply, not alter, the work of the people’s representatives,” Gorsuch said on Tuesday at the White House event announcing the nomination in remarks that echoed Scalia’s views.

One of the most high profile cases that Gorsuch was involved with came in 2013. That was the famous “Hobby Lobby case”, and it represented a key turning point in the fight for religious freedom. The following comes from CNN…

In 2013, he joined in an opinion by the full Court of Appeals holding that federal law prohibited the Department of Health and Human Services from requiring closely-held, for-profit secular corporations to provide contraceptive coverage as part of their employer-sponsored health insurance plans.

And although a narrowly divided 5-4 Supreme Court would endorse that view (and affirm the 10th Circuit) the following year, Gorsuch wrote that he would have gone even further, and allowed not just the corporations, but the individual owners, to challenge the mandate.

Donald Trump said that he wanted a conservative judge in the mold of Scalia, but I think that he was also looking for someone that he could get through the Senate.

And considering the fact that Gorsuch was confirmed unanimously by the Senate in 2006 will make it quite difficult for Democrats to block him now. Gorsuch has tremendous academic and professional credentials, and he will probably have a smoother road to confirmation than someone like appeals court judge William Pryor would…

Trump may have favored Gorsuch for the job in hopes of a smoother confirmation process than for other potential candidates such as appeals court judge William Pryor, who has called the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.”

But Pryor is still reportedly on the short list for the next spot on the Supreme Court that opens up, and by then the rancor in the Senate may have died down.

If Gorsuch is confirmed, what will this mean for some of the most important moral issues of our time?

As for abortion, even if Gorsuch is confirmed I do not believe that the votes are there to overturn Roe v. Wade. But if Trump is able to nominate a couple more Supreme Court justices that could change.

But even if Roe v. Wade is overturned, it would not suddenly make abortion illegal. Instead, all 50 states would then be free to make their own laws regarding abortion, and a solid majority of the states would continue to keep it legal.

The analysis is similar when we look at gay marriage. If the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage in all 50 states was overturned, each state would get to decide whether gay marriage should be legal or not for their own citizens. And just like with abortion, it is likely that only a limited number of states would end up banning gay marriage.

So the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court appears to be a positive step, but it does not mean that we are going to see dramatic change when it comes to issues such as abortion or gay marriage any time soon.

But at least Gorsuch can help stop the relentless march of the progressive agenda through our court system. So in the end we may not make that much progress for right now, but at least the liberals won’t either.

Did you know that 89 percent of all minimum wage workers in the United States are not teens? At this point, the average age of a minimum wage worker in this country is 36, and 56 percent of them are women. Millions upon millions of Americans are working as hard as they can (often that means two or three jobs), and yet despite all of their hard work they still find themselves mired in poverty. One of the big reasons for this is that we have created two classes of workers in the United States. “Full-time workers” are entitled to an array of benefits and protections by law that “part-time workers” do not get. And thanks to perverse incentives contained in Obamacare and other ridiculous laws, we have motivated employers to move as many workers from the “full-time” category to the “part-time” category as possible. It may be hard to believe, but right now only 44 percent of all U.S. adults are employed for 30 or more hours each week. But to get any kind of a job at all is a real challenge in many parts of the country today. As you read this article, there are more than 100 million working age Americans that are not employed in any capacity. And according to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if the federal government was actually using honest numbers the unemployment rate would be sitting at 23 percent. That is not an “employment recovery” – that is a national crisis.

The following infographic comes from the Economic Policy Institute. I certainly do not agree with a lot of the things that the Economic Policy Institute stands for, but I think that these numbers do accurately reflect what “part-time America” looks like today…

So what is the solution to this problem?

Most Democrats believe that raising the minimum wage would fix this. But as Zero Hedge has pointed out, it isn’t quite that simple…

Last week, we noted that Democratic lawmakers in the US are pushing for what they call “$12 by ’20” which, as the name implies, is an effort to raise the minimum wage to $12/hour over the course of the next five years. Republicans argue that if Democrats got their wish and the pay floor were increased by nearly 70%, it would do more harm than good for low-income Americans as the number of jobs that would be lost as a result of employers cutting back in the face of dramatically higher labor costs would offset the benefit that accrues to the workers who are lucky enough to keep their jobs.

Yes, raising the minimum wage would make life better for many minimum wage workers in America. But a large number of them would also lose their jobs completely, and a lot of small businesses would deeply suffer financially.

Ideally, what we would love to see happen is for the U.S. economy to be producing so many good jobs that the only people that are looking for entry-level part-time jobs would be teens, people just starting out in the workforce, etc. Back when I was a teen, I remember walking into a McDonald’s and getting hired on the spot because they were in dire need of workers. Sadly, those days are long, long gone.

Over the past several decades, millions of good paying American jobs have been shipped overseas, and millions more have been lost to advancing technology. And as I wrote about the other day, Barack Obama is deeply betraying American workers by working on a global economic treaty that would destroy millions more good paying jobs.

Thanks to the foolishness of our politicians, there is now intense competition even for minimum wage jobs at this point.

We keep hearing about an “employment recovery”, but it is a giant lie. Posted below is a chart of the civilian employment to population ratio. As you can see, the percentage of the working age population that is actually employed is much, much lower than it used to be…

In recent months, we have seen the employment-population ratio move slightly higher. But can this be called “an employment recovery”? Of course not. We are still way, way below the level that we were at just prior to the last recession, and now the next recession is just about upon us.

Meanwhile, the quality of our jobs continues to decline as more Americans are being pushed into “part-time work” with each passing year.

Since February of 2008, the size of the U.S. population has grown by 16.8 million people. But during that same time frame, the number of full-time jobs in this country has actually decreased.

And at this point, the majority of American workers simply do not make enough money to support a middle class family. The following income numbers come directly from the Social Security Administration…

-39 percent of American workers make less than $20,000 a year.

-52 percent of American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

-63 percent of American workers make less than $40,000 a year.

-72 percent of American workers make less than $50,000 a year.

Are you starting to see why I am so fired up about all of this?

We have developed a business culture in this country which does not care about workers. In business schools all over America, future executives are taught that a corporation only has one goal – to maximize wealth for the shareholders. Taking care of those that are part of your team is treated as an afterthought at best.

As corporations have gotten bigger, they have shown less and less concern for those that work for them. These days, employees are generally regarded as “expensive liabilities” that are to be discarded the moment that their usefulness has come to an end. And news of layoffs is often rewarded by Wall Street by a surge in the stock prices of the companies making those layoffs.

In the old days, more businesses in America were family-owned, and employees were often regarded as almost “part of the family”. Unfortunately, those days have disappeared forever.

Now, employees are treated like scum by many big companies, and if they don’t like how they are being treated they are told that they can leave. For example, just consider what was going on at a security company down in Florida…

Jose Molero worked as a site inspector for the company, which provides security for neighborhoods and companies across the country, for more than a year.

Molero says when he went to the Kensington Golf and Country Club guardhouse, he found wooden paddles on a desk, some with staff names on them and one reading “for staff discipline.”

He says there was also what is called a “Wall of Shame,” where the supervisor points out and posts reports that contain grammatical errors.

When Molero complained about these things to his district manager, he was told that if anyone was offended “maybe they shouldn’t work here”…

Molero contacted his operations manager, who told him to speak with the district manager. He says the district manager sent him an email response that said, “if that hurts their feelings then maybe they shouldn’t work here.”

Do you have a similar horror story to share?

Most of us do.

The U.S. economy is absolutely dominated by cold, heartless corporations that have no interest in listening to the little guy. If they could find a way to do it, many of them would operate with no low-level employees at all. And as technology continues to advance, they will replace as many of us as they can with robots, drones, machines and computers.

I’ll be honest with you – the future for workers in America looks really bleak. The competition for any jobs that can’t be shipped overseas or replaced by technology is going to become even more heated. This means that the middle class is going to get even smaller, the number of Americans dependent on the government is going to continue to explode, and the disparity between the wealthy and the poor is going to become even greater.

So what is the solution to this giant mess? Please feel free to tell us what you think by posting a comment below…

Share this list of shocking questions with everyone you know that needs to wake up. Sometimes asking good questions is the best way to get someone that you care about to understand something. When I attended law school, I became very familiar with something called “the Socratic method”. It is a method that has been traditionally used in law schools all over the United States. Law professors will bombard their students with questions, and the goal is to stimulate critical thinking and allow students to discover the answers for themselves. Many times those of us that can see what is happening to this country get frustrated when we try to get others to see what is so apparent to us. But instead of preaching to them, perhaps asking questions would be more helpful. When you ask someone a question, they are almost forced to think about what you just said and come up with a response. And without a doubt, the fact that America is in decline is undeniable. Those that would choose to blindly have faith in the system are foolish, because it is glaringly obvious that the system is failing. Our economy is heading for collapse and the world around us is becoming more unstable with each passing day. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the number of preppers in the United States is absolutely exploding. Some estimates put the number of preppers in the U.S. as high as 3 million, and the movement continues to explode.

So exactly what is a “prepper”? Well, the truth is that there is a tremendous amount of diversity among the people that fall under that label.

To me, you don’t have to move to Montana and store 500 cases of MREs in a nuclear fallout shelter to be considered a prepper. I believe that anyone that can see a very serious crisis coming and that is taking steps to prepare for that crisis would be considered a prepper. You might be living next to one and never even know it. Many families have converted spare rooms into food pantries or are taking survival training on the weekends. Others have renewed their interest in gardening or have started to invest in precious metals. As far as I am concerned, anything that you can do to become more self-sufficient and more independent of the system is a good thing, because the system is rapidly failing.

Perhaps you are reading this and you are thinking that people who are “preparing for disaster” are being rather foolish. Well, I encourage you to read the list of questions that I have compiled below and come to your own conclusions.

The following are 50 shocking questions that you should ask to anyone that is not a prepper yet…

#1 Why are sales of physical silver coins breaking all sorts of all-time records? The U.S. Mint is on pace to sell more silver eagles during the first month of 2013 than it did during the entire year of 2007.

#2 Why has Germany announced that it will be moving gold from New York and Paris to its own vaults back home? Is this a sign of a breakdown in trust among global central banks?

#30 Why did the U.S. national debt grow during the first four years of the Obama administration by about as much as it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that George W. Bush took office?

#37 Why has the percentage of men with jobs in the United States fallen so dramatically? Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.

#38 Why are so many Americans poor today? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income”. Why is this happening?

#45 Why are more than 50 percent of all children in Detroit living in poverty? Detroit used to be one of the greatest cities in the entire world. How did such prosperity turn into such desolation?

#46 Why did a violent riot break out at an event where government-subsidized section 8 housing vouchers were being handed out in a suburb of Detroit earlier this month? Is this the kind of unrest that we can expect to see all over the country when things get really bad?

#50 Why is global power concentrated in so few hands? According to the Swiss Federal Institute, a network of 147 mega-corporations control 40 percent of all the wealth in the world, and in a previous article I described how just six obscenely powerful corporations completely dominate the media industry in the United States. Is it good for such incredible power to be concentrated in the hands of so few people?

Please share this article with as many people as you can. It only takes a few moments to share an article, but the person on the other end that reads it might have their life changed forever.

Do you have any questions that you think should be added to this list? Please feel free to share your thoughts by leaving a comment below…

What does America stand for? That question is a lot more complicated than you might think. Our Founding Fathers established a Republic that was based on a set of shared values that were embodied in the text of the U.S. Constitution. But today, many of our politicians openly disregard the Constitution whenever they want and it has become fashionable to mock the U.S. Constitution. For example, the New York Times recently published a piece by Georgetown University Professor Louis Michael Seidman entitled “Let’s Give Up On The Constitution” in which he publicly called the Constitution “archaic” and “downright evil”. This is a man that has been teaching constitutional law to the next generation of lawyers at one of the top universities in the nation for nearly 40 years. Unfortunately, Seidman is not an aberration. The truth is that law schools all over America are absolutely packed with professors that teach that we should consider the U.S. Constitution a “living, breathing document” that must “evolve” as society evolves. They also teach that when we find something in the Constitution that does not work for us today that we should just ignore it. In fact, in his New York Times article Seidman insisted that “constitutional disobedience” is “as old as the Republic”. But if we can just ignore the U.S. Constitution whenever we want, where does that leave us? Should we be able to ignore all laws when they are not convenient for us?

Personally, I strongly believe that we should follow the U.S. Constitution, and there are millions of others out there that agree with me. If we want to amend the Constitution, there is a procedure for doing that, but it is not easy. Our founders did that to try to ensure that any changes to our Constitution would reflect an overwhelming consensus of the American people.

But today America is more divided than ever before. We can’t seem to agree on much of anything. We are at a period in our history when we desperately need to come together, but instead we are constantly at each other’s throats.

Is there anything that truly unites us anymore?

In the old days, if you would have asked people to give you a one word definition of America, many people would have responded by naming important values such as “freedom” and “liberty”.

Sadly, much of the country appears not to even value those things any longer. One poll found that 51 percent of all Americans believe that “it is necessary to give up some civil liberties in order to make the country safe from terrorism.” Other surveys have found similar results.

Not only that, we continue to elect control freak politicians from both political parties that appear to be obsessed with constantly eroding our freedoms and liberties. There are literally millions of ridiculous laws, rules and regulations that govern even the smallest details of our lives, and the government is constantly inventing new ways to watch, track, register, monitor and control all of us. If you doubt this, please see this article and this article. If we continue down this path, we are going to end up in a very dark place as a nation.

Well, what about economics?

Aren’t we united by a common economic philosophy?

Sadly, no we are not.

In the old days, Americans overwhelmingly believed in free market capitalism and overwhelmingly rejected socialism, but now that is rapidly changing.

According to a stunning Pew Research Center survey, 49 percent of Americans in the 18 to 29 age bracket have a positive view of socialism while only 46 percent of Americans in that same age bracket have a positive view of capitalism.

So what will the future look like if we continue to see this kind of shift among our young people?

And of course we have not had anything even close to a true free market system in the United States in a very, very long time. Our economy is dominated by a partnership between the federal government and the monolithic predator corporations that dominate our society. Individuals and small businesses that try to compete are being absolutely suffocated. Our Founding Fathers were very suspicious of all large concentrations of power, and they sought to greatly limit the power of both the federal government and of the big corporations. But today we have gone totally in the other direction.

Well, is there anything else that truly unites America?

What about religion?

Of course it is true that the overwhelming majority of the early colonists were Christian, and even 50 years ago it would have been accurate to say that America was a “Christian nation”, but that is definitely no longer the case today.

The number of Americans with no religious affiliation has absolutely exploded in recent years. It has grown by a whopping 25 percent over the past five years, and meanwhile the percentage of people that identify themselves as “Christians” in America is dropping like a rock. In fact, one poll found that the percentage of Protestants in the United States has dropped below 50 percent for the first time ever. For many more shocking numbers that show the precipitous decline of Christianity in America, please see this article.

So what fundamental principles do most Americans actually agree on?

And I am not talking about things like “American Idol is going downhill” or “Justin Bieber gets too much attention”.

Is there still a core set of shared values that the entire nation can agree upon?

If not, where does that leave us?

Unfortunately, I think that it leaves us in a very difficult place. The divisiveness that we have seen in Washington D.C. in recent years is just the tip of the iceberg. We are living in a nation today that is more divided than I can ever remember. A whole host of opinion polls have shown that anger and frustration in America are rising to very dangerous levels, and instead of focusing on the real reasons for our problems we all tend to point the fingers at one another.

In America today, we have been trained to group ourselves together by certain “categories” and to see those on the other side as “the enemy”. This is a very dangerous thing. It keeps the American people from coming together to fix the very serious problems that are facing our country.

The truth is that we are being divided in dozens of different ways today. The following are just a few of the ways we are currently being divided…

Republican vs. Democrat

Conservative vs. Liberal

Rich vs. Poor

Black vs. White (or insert any other two races or ethnic groups)

North vs. South

Urban vs. Rural

Anti-Gun vs. Pro-Gun

Male vs. Female

Young vs. Old

Traditional vs. “Modern”

Religious vs. Secular

Of course we should never compromise what we believe just for the sake of “unity”. That is foolishness. But you can disagree with someone without hating them.

In America today, people will find a reason to hate someone else at the drop of a hat. Surprisingly large numbers of Americans will hate others because of where they are from, what they look like, what their ethnic background is, what their political affiliation is or what their religious beliefs are.

If America is going to have any kind of a future, we have got to start loving one another. That does not mean that we all have to agree with one another. But we do need to start caring about one another and hoping for the best for one another.

For example, I fundamentally disagree with almost every single thing that Barack Obama does. But I do not hate him. On the contrary, I pray for him and his family. I would love to see him experience a 180 degree turnaround and start fighting for the truth. I believe that love is stronger than hate, and I believe that there is hope for every one of us.

I know that I have had my mind changed on a lot of things throughout my life, and if I could go back there are many things I would do differently. I am thankful for those that loved me and had patience with me when I was younger.

And that is the kind of grace that we should extend toward others. Yes, a stand needs to be made when others are promoting evil and trampling on our rights. But instead of responding to hate with even greater amounts of hate, perhaps it would be better if we responded with even greater amounts of love.

And I am not saying that we always have to be “meek” in our approach. For example, if I was pushing a shopping cart around the local supermarket and I came upon a young child that was about to guzzle an entire bottle of liquid bleach, I would yell and scream at that child to stop. Sometimes yelling and screaming is the loving thing to do. There is nothing wrong with “tough love”.

There are preachers and radio hosts that I know that express what they believe in a very vociferous manner, but it is coming from a good place. They love their listeners and they love their country and they are just trying to wake people up. There is nothing wrong with that.

On the flip side, there are others that truly do hate particular categories of people. For example, I was on a radio show earlier today, and the first half of the interview went great as I explained the problems with our economy, how our cities are degenerating and how the Federal Reserve is at the very heart of our financial problems as a nation.

But then in the second half of the interview, the radio host started blaming one particular ethnic group for all of our problems. I had not properly researched this particular host and I was horrified. I told her in a very clear manner that I thought that she was wrong. I don’t think that she appreciated that very much.

But the truth is that we are never going to fix the very serious problems that are facing this country if we choose to hate one another because of what we look like or who our ancestors were. We are never going to fix the very serious problems that are facing this country if we choose to remain trapped in the “red vs. blue” paradigm and keep pointing fingers of hatred at one another. We are never going to fix the very serious problems that are facing this country if we would rather indulge in hatred rather than love.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t fight for what is right. There are most certainly politicians that need to be voted out of office. There are most certainly big corporations that need to be exposed. There are most definitely evil agendas that are being promoted at the highest levels. Our society is clearly headed in the wrong direction and this country needs a massive wake up call.

But I think that we will get a lot farther if love is our primary motivation. Without love, we are nothing. Let us start to love one another as we would like to be loved ourselves.

So what do all of you think about this? I am sure that there are probably some very strong opinions out there. Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…

Most people just assume that since things have always been a certain way that they will always be that way in the future. Most people just have blind faith that the people running our government and our financial system know exactly what they are doing and that they are doing their best to take care of us. In fact, once upon a time I was fully convinced of that. When I was a kid I quickly realized that my elementary school teachers really didn’t have the answers, but I had total faith that those running society at the highest levels were “experts” that were looking out for our best interests. As time went on I kept progressing in my education, and by the time I was finished with law school I came to understand that none of our “experts” really know what they are doing, and they are definitely not looking out for our best interests. The blind are leading the blind and we all need to finally admit that the emperor is not wearing any clothes. Unfortunately, most Americans will repeat the mantra of “if that was true I would have heard about it on the news” until it is way too late. Most people are waiting for the “authorities” to tell them what to do instead of thinking for themselves. Sadly, time is rapidly running out and a lot of people are going to end up getting totally blindsided by what is coming.

The man in charge of our financial system, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, is not going to save our economy. He didn’t see the last financial crisis coming, and even after things started falling apart he continued to insist that housing prices would not go down and that we would not have a recession.

Well, it turned out that we had the worst housing crash and the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But still millions of Americans are trusting him to save us this time around.

The biggest reason why the U.S. government is 16 trillion dollars in debt is because the system is designed to create gigantic amounts of government debt.

Yes, without a doubt the vast majority of our politicians are corrupt and/or incompetent, but even if we replaced every single one of them our economic problems would still persist until the underlying structural problems were addressed.

Most Americans are pinning their hopes for an economic turnaround on the upcoming election, but the truth is that neither Obama or Romney has a plan that will fix things. That statement is going to upset a lot of people on both sides of the political spectrum, but it is true.

Over the past 40 years the total amount of all debt in the United States has gone from less than 2 trillion dollars to almost 55 trillion dollars. This bubble is going to burst no matter which political party is in power.

Obama and the Democrats have tried to kick the can down the road and extend the party by spending 5.3 trillion borrowed dollars over the past 4 years, but by doing so they have made our long-term problems far worse.

The next wave of the economic crisis is fast approaching and people need to get prepared.

After working six years as a senior executive for a multinational payroll-processing company in Barcelona, Spain, Mr. Vildosola is cutting his professional and financial ties with his troubled homeland. He has moved his family to a village near Cambridge, England, where he will take the reins at a small software company, and he has transferred his savings from Spanish banks to British banks.

“The macro situation in Spain is getting worse and worse,” Mr. Vildosola, 38, said last week just hours before boarding a plane to London with his wife and two small children. “There is just too much risk. Spain is going to be next after Greece, and I just don’t want to end up holding devalued pesetas.”

During the month of July alone, 94 billion dollars was pulled out of the Spanish banking system.

So that means that the equivalent of 7 percent of Spain’s GDP was withdrawn from Spanish banks during July.

That is a full-blown bank run, and Spain’s problems are just getting started.

Eventually these kinds of problems will show up in the United States as well.

You Could End Up Losing All Of Your Investments

But at least U.S. bank accounts are federally insured (for whatever that is worth).

When it comes to investments, you better be very sure that the firms you have your money with are not going to collapse on you.

For example, many of you have already heard about how Gerald Celente had losses in the six figure range when MF Global went bankrupt. He has been warning about the coming economic collapse for years and he still got victimized. The following is what he told one interviewer about what he learned from this incident….

“What’s the take away from this? It’s to make sure you have every penny in your pocket. Because just like MF (Global), screwed everybody else. Your also gonna get the shaft, I don’t care who it is. What’s gonna happen when you get a message from your brokerage, from Fidelity or somebody… yeah infidelity. Or how about Raymond James, I don’t care who they are! You have ETFs? Oh, there’s a little error over here, we don’t have your money. We don’t have your positions.“

“I went to a meeting… and the speaker said ETFs of GLD are supposed to be held by HSBC in a vault in Hong Kong or England some place, and HSBC, this guy said, is the biggest shorter of gold. Well you figure it out! They are the ones that are holding it and they’re shorting it? So the takeaway is to make sure you have every penny in your possession.“

If the funds that you are relying on for your financial future are being held by a brokerage or by an insurance company the truth is that you could potentially lose every single penny during the coming collapse.

The financial institution that you are depending on could suddenly go “poof” and your money could be gone just like that.

Recent legal rulings have made brokerage accounts much more vulnerable. Jim Willie explained why this is true in a recent article….

The critical jump might occur in account thefts from futures brokerage to stock brokerage, which began in November 2011 with MFGlobal, then appeared in July with Peregrine Financial Group (PFG-Best). All private accounts from MFG and PFG have been pilfered, with a blessing of the theft by the courts, seen in the Sentinel Mgmt Group ruling. The federal Appellate court’s August ruling (CLICK HERE) sets precedent for future private segregated account thefts, which were once considered sacred and untouchable. No more in the United States, not in the unfolding of criminality that stretches from USGovt offices to top corporate offices, with blessings sprinkled by the courts. The jump would be a major extension of the Fascist Business Model that nobody talks about. The major financial firms can rely upon this appellate court ruling as precedent, so as to protect their legal right to re-hypothecate client funds in their high risk leveraged positions and loans. It sure would be nice to use my neighbor’s house and car to firm up my casino weekends. Stay tuned to the ongoing Morgan Stanley implosion, which could force the vanishing act of 50 to 100 thousand private stock accounts. The firm is the largest stock brokerage firm in the land. The dreadful impact will be nasty and might awaken the US masses. MFGlobal and PFG-Best surely did not.

Your financial advisers will swear up and down that your investments are safe.

But look at what happened to the clients of MF Global and PFG-Best.

Their investments disappeared like dust in the wind.

This isn’t meant to scare you. It is just important that you understand that the landscape has totally changed.

You Could Lose Your House

During the last recession, millions of Americans lost their homes.

Some of them had poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into their homes and they lost it all.

Why did this happen?

Well, the number one reason is because so many American families are living on the edge. They purchased homes that they could not afford and they just kept living paycheck to paycheck as if nothing bad would ever happen.

But when many of those people lost their jobs, suddenly they could not make their mortgage payments and they lost their homes as well.

Tens of thousands of customers remained in the dark Monday in Louisiana and Mississippi, nearly a week after Isaac inundated the Gulf Coast with a deluge that still has some low-lying areas under water.

Most of those were in Louisiana, where utilities reported more than 100,000 people without power. Thousands also were without power in Mississippi and Arkansas.

So what would you do if there was a major national crisis of some sort and the grid went down for an extended period of time during the winter?

When Thieves Get Desperate They Will Steal Just About Anything

Over and over it has been proven that when people cannot feed their families they will steal to get what they need.

When things hit the fan here in the United States, we will see widespread looting and robbing. In fact, we are already seeing it happen in Europe. Just check out what is happening in Spain right now….

Unemployed fieldworkers and other members of the union went to two supermarkets, one in Ecija (Sevilla) and one in Arcos de la Frontera (Cadiz) and loaded up trolleys with basic necessities. They said that the people were being expropriated and they planned to “expropriate the expropriators”.

The foodstuffs, including milk, sugar, chickpeas, pasta and rice, have been given to charities to distribute, who say they are unable to cope with all the requests for help they receive. Unemployment in the Sierra de Cadiz is now 40%.

And already crime is rising in many areas of the United States. In some communities thieves are stealing just about anything that is not bolted down.

Just recently, 49 cows that were stolen from a farm in Massachusetts were discovered at an auction in Pennsylvania.

Who would be desperate enough to steal cows?

In other areas of the country thieves are stealing air conditioning units from churches and they are stripping copper wiring out of city street lights.

Are you prepared to defend your property when desperate thieves come knocking?

Shortages Can Happen

During an economic collapse shortages can happen very rapidly. Thanks to the popularity of the “just in time inventory” philosophy, most stores do not have much stuff sitting around in their back rooms. When things go bad, you may not be able to get the things that you need.

Just look at what is happening in Greece. Right now, medicine shortages have become a major problem. The following is from a recent Bloomberg article….

Mina Mavrou, who runs a pharmacy in a middle-class Athens suburb, spends hours each day pleading with drugmakers, wholesalers and colleagues to hunt down medicines for clients. Life-saving drugs such as Sanofi (SAN)’s blood-thinner Clexane and GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK)’s asthma inhaler Flixotide often appear as lines of crimson data on pharmacists’ computer screens, meaning the products aren’t in stock or that pharmacists can’t order as many units as they need.

“When we see red, we want to cry,” Mavrou said. “The situation is worsening day by day.”

The 12,000 pharmacies that dot almost every street corner in Greek cities are the damaged capillaries of a complex system for getting treatment to patients. The Panhellenic Association of Pharmacists reports shortages of almost half the country’s 500 most-used medicines. Even when drugs are available, pharmacists often must foot the bill up front, or patients simply do without.

You Could End Up Dependent On The Government

Don’t think that it can’t happen.

Today, 46.7 million Americans are on food stamps and more than half of all Americans are at least partially financially dependent on the U.S. government.

That may be hard to believe, but it is actually true.

During the month of June, the number of Americans added to the food stamp rolls was three times greater than the number of jobs added to the economy.

What a great “recovery”, eh?

If you do not work very hard to prepare for what is ahead right now, you could also end up dependent on the government.

You Could Lose Your Life

Whenever there is a major economic crisis there is a spike in suicides.

And these days Americans are more wrapped up in materialism than ever before. When the coming crisis strikes there are going to be millions upon millions of extremely depressed people.

Suicide is about the most stupid thing that you can possibly do, but when people lose all hope of things turning around a lot of them are going to take their own lives.

It is foolish beyond belief, but a lot of people are going to make that choice. We are already seeing a significant spike in suicides over in Europe due to the economy. The following is from a recent CNBC article….

A growing number of global and European health bodies are warning that the introduction and intensification of austerity measures has led to a sharp rise in mental health problems with suicide rates, alcohol abuse and requests for anti-depressants increasing as people struggle with the psychological cost of living through a European-wide recession.

“No one should be surprised that factors such as unemployment, debt and relationship breakdowns can cause bouts of mental illness and may push people who are already vulnerable to take their own lives,” Richard Colwill, of the British mental health charity Sane, told CNBC.

“There does appear to be a connection between unemployment rates and suicide for example,” he said, referring to a recent study in the British Medical Journal that stated that more than 1,000 people in the U.K. may have killed themselves because of the impacts of the recession. “This research reflects other work showing similar rises in suicides across Europe.”

This is why I stress that preparation is not just about physical things like money and food.

We all need to get mentally, emotionally and spiritually prepared for what is ahead.

If we understand what is happening and we come up with a plan to go through it, we will be in far, far better position to endure the coming crisis than people that are totally blindsided by it.

Are you good at flipping burgers , waiting tables or stocking shelves? Are you proficient with a cash register? Do you enjoy doing mindless work for very low pay? If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you are probably going to fit in very well in the new U.S. economy. According to a report that has just been released by the National Employment Law Project, 58 percent of the jobs that have been created since the end of the recession have been low paying jobs. So exactly what is a low paying job? Well, the National Employment Law Project defines it as a job with an hourly wage between $7.69 and $13.83. But of course you can’t pay a mortgage or support a family on $13.83 an hour. Even if you got full-time hours the entire year, you would make less than $28,000 on an annual basis. The federal poverty level for a family of five is $27,010. So needless to say, most of these new jobs are not paying enough to support a middle class lifestyle. This represents an economic failure on a fundamental level. Our economy is producing very few good jobs that enable people to be able to raise families and live the American Dream. The ranks of “the working poor” are exploding and the number of Americans that are dependent on the government is sitting at an all-time record. Sadly, if current trends continue things are going to get a lot worse.

The numbers compiled by the National Employment Law Project are absolutely stunning. Most of the jobs lost during the recent recession were mid-wage jobs, and most of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs. This represents a fundamental shift in our economy. Just check out these figures….

–21 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were low wage jobs paying between $7.69 and $13.83 an hour.

–58 percent of the jobs created since the end of the recession have been low wage jobs paying between $7.69 and $13.83 an hour.

–60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs paying between $13.84 and $21.13 an hour.

–22 percent of the jobs created since the end of the recession have been mid-wage jobs paying between $13.84 and $21.13 an hour.

But even the high end of the mid-wage pay scale is not that great.

If you make $21.13 an hour and you work full-time hours for the entire year you will end up making about 42,000 for an entire year.

Yes, that can probably support a family of four in most areas of the country, but you really have to scrimp and save to do it.

And keep in mind that 80 percent of all the jobs being created now pay at that level or less.

Welcome to the new U.S. economy.

It really stinks for workers.

The truth is that there has been a fundamental cultural change in our economy. Workers are no longer valued. They are viewed as expensive liabilities that should be disposed of as rapidly as possible once their usefulness has ended.

There is very little loyalty to workers these days, and most big corporations do not really care about the quality of the lives of their workers. The number of companies offering health insurance to their workers continues to decline (and thanks to Obamacare that decline is accelerating even further), and the number of companies offering pension plans to their workers continues to decrease as well.

At this point, less than 25 percent of all jobs in the United States are good jobs, and that number continues to shrink.

Is this because the big corporations are not making enough money?

Not at all.

In fact, corporate profits have been setting all-time records in recent years….

Meanwhile, wages as a percentage of the economy are at an all-time low….

So why is this happening?

Well, I already talked about the fundamental cultural shift that is happening. Companies simply do not care about their workers like they used to. America is becoming a very cold place.

Another major factor is that millions upon millions of our good jobs have been shipped overseas thanks to the emerging one world economy.

In the old days, U.S. corporations were more or less forced to hire American workers and the wages earned from a typical manufacturing job could easily support a growing family.

That has entirely changed now.

The big corporations no longer need American workers to make stuff. They can just close up shop and move their facilities to the other side of the globe where it is legal to pay slave labor wages to very desperate workers.

And now there is greatly increased competition for the jobs that we still have in this country because so many of our jobs have disappeared.

If you don’t like how your employer is treating you that is just too bad. In most cases your employer would have absolutely no problem finding a replacement for you. In fact, there are probably thousands of people in your community that are desperate for a job such as yours.